Ray DelPriore

I couldn't let my friend Ray go without writing down a few things. I'm glad I got to tell him how I felt when we got together.

I remember when Ray DelPriore wouldn’t have anything to do with me. These thirteen-year-old kids in 1969, most notably my brother and Ray, didn’t want me hanging around and hearing and seeing things I might tell my parents. What they didn’t know was how the “guy code” kicks in early in life. I’d never just outright rat out my brother and Ray. But they knew odds were strong I would collapse under questioning. They never did consider I had my own ass to protect. Because if my parents discovered I idled among Marlboro clouds and all sorts of profanities, the punishment would extend not only to my brother but also to me. So, I did my best to shut my mouth and avoid incriminating myself. But these older guys couldn’t take the risk that a six-year-old boy might sing— badly, like Tiny Tim. They’d chase me home and tell me to find someone my own age.

Ray, more considerate than most in those days, would take it a step further. He did know a kid my age. He walked me down the street to knock on that kid’s door. For years after, my new friend and I would climb trees and ride our trikes over the sidewalks from the crest of the hill near Front Street to the flatter ground bordering the Ridolfi Brother's parking lot, where gravity finally failed us.

I could never be in Ray’s company without thinking of my brother. Ray was our neighbor and my brother Ned’s lifelong loyal friend. After my brother passed in ‘86, Ray and I would often lament. Late one evening over some Dewars and water, he and I discussed the way things used to be. I remembered some things he didn’t.

With his rendition of the national anthem, Hendrix rattled the psyche of at least one seven-year-old in a war-weary nation. I’d probably heard the version a hundred times since the record debuted. Walking up Broad Street I heard it again in 1971 or thereabouts. I thought someone played it through one of those old, polished tree-stumps of a stereo everyone had in their living room. I walked toward the sound that led me down a bleak, weedy, littered and cracked sidewalk along the side of a faded sage-green stucco apartment building. It featured three dwellings layered horizontally on each side like shabby chic dresser drawers in need of a facelift. From the middle of Tunnel Street, the infrequently traveled alley, I looked up to the balcony at the back of the place. It wasn’t Hendrix on someone’s stereo, after all. A fifteen-year-old Ray had his axe and his amp out on the faded grey wooden overhang—gathering color from a phosphoric wash of reverb and feedback and fuzz and wah and anger. I thought I’d ask a guitar player about the effects for this description. But then I figured—misinterpreted or not—maybe I could feel it out for myself. When I went back and listened to Hendrix’s performance at full volume after a decade or so of not hearing it, the song whapped me off my desk chair and somewhere into the ether. For so many reasons.

As far as artificially optimistic last-call conversations go, Ray and I that night blathered about driving west and ending the weekend fulsome and cold and contented on park benches, with like-kind patrons of the blues on Maxwell Street in Chicago. In places like that, we imagined a soul still existed.

Though I’d seen him many times since I was six, I will always remember Ray as that teenager. I’ll think about seeing him clomp down Broad Street wearing technicolor bellbottoms and turquoise suede platform boots-- amber crescent-moons and saffron stars sewn to the vamps and quarters, not unlike something Jimi might have worn to Monterrey, or that farm in upstate New York.

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